The QHY 183M Pro is a cooled monochrome camera ideal for telescopes with short and medium focal lengths. It contains the Sony IMX 183 Exmor R, a back-illuminated CMOS sensor with a quantum efficiency of 84% (monochrome version).
The pixels have a size of only 2.4µm, making this camera ideal for small refractors and Newtonian telescopes. For example, this camera combined with a 400mm telescope offers a pixel scale of 1.25"/pixel and a field of 1.89° x 1.26°, ideal for objects such as the Lagoon Nebula (M8), Orion Nebula (M42) or the Horsehead Nebula. With a 800mm telescope, the pixel scale reduces to 0.62"/pixel and the field to 0.91° x 0.63° for a tighter framing of smaller nebulae such as the Omega (M17), Eagle (M16), Helix (NGC 7293) or the Sculptor Galaxy.
The 128MB DDR II memory buffer facilitates the download of images to the computer, especially when USB traffic is high, the writing speed of your computer is slow or occupied in other processes. A 16-bit image of the 183M Pro is about 40MB in size so the 128MB memory is more than sufficient to provisionally store a few full resolution images while the computer is writing the image to the disk.
This camera has a two-stage TEC cooling system that brings the temperature of the sensor 40C° - 45C° below ambient for a low noise imaging, even in warm climates. The dark current at -15°C is only 0.042 electron/pixels. The sensor chamber is sealed and the protecting window heater prevents the formation of dew.
The QHY 183M Pro incorporates the Amp-Glow technology to significantly reduce the typical CMOS sensor amplifier glow to a minimum, allowing to easily subtract any residual effect with dark frames. In order to avoid halos around bright stars, the QHY 183M has an AR coated optical window on both sides rather than the common IR/UV cut window. For a better RGB colour balance, it is recommended to use a UV/IR cut filter.